Cathy Diamond

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My new work explores two distinct and sometimes interwoven bodies of paintings that together investigate the tension between structure and spontaneity, the abstract and the embodied.

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Gestural Abstraction: Visual Music

The first series is rooted in an abstract, rhythmic space where repetitive gestural marks and strokes express the relationship between energy, pattern, and personal symbol. My process involves a delicate balance of intention and improvisation – layering ink, line and paint wash to create unique textures that pulse with movement. Drawing on years in the textile industry and an education in textile design, I am reconnecting with the way shapes and lines connect and reconnect across a surface, as though weaving a visual score. Rhythms circulate and weave through the picture plane, marks becoming characters on a shallow, interactive stage.  I employ instinct to sustain a game between ground and form, each generating the other, each pushing back.

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These works bridge my love of both the sensitivity of Chinese landscape painting and modernist automatism. Executed largely on absorbent paper – then mounted to panel and canvas – they address the complexities of making: how ink bleeds, how wash opens space, how a single mark can suggest a bird, a vine, a figure, an ecosystem glimpsed through layers of growth.

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Figurative Works: A Floating Society

This body of work examines a world of emergent figures – dancers, strollers, sitters – caught in a shared pictorial space that subverts traditional notions of ground and gravity. I am driven by where the figures take me; they arrive through gesture rather than described by outline. Untethered and remote, they form a kind of floating society. My work explores the instability of that coexistence: alone and together, stretching, reaching and turning, they populate compositions the way figures inhabit pale beaches or russet desert parks seen from overhead – randomly juxtaposed and alive.

Blending the visual language of a kind of modernist cave drawing with a warm palette of earth pinks, rust, gold, turquoise and gray, these paintings challenge the viewer to reconsider what a figure can be. The work reflects both the changeability of life and a deep belief that, in spite of our existential uncertainty, something – call it joy, call it an ancient pull to innocence – continues.